


fertilizer

by tsunderestorm



Category: Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Genre: Corpse Desecration, Dismemberment, Gen, Language of Flowers, Murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:15:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27179110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tsunderestorm/pseuds/tsunderestorm
Summary: Marluxia cultivates a garden of corpses.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 22





	fertilizer

**Author's Note:**

> Please heed the warnings! Although this piece is short, all of these things are mentioned in varying degrees of detail. If you think anything might be off-putting to you, turn back now.
> 
> I’m playing fast and loose with KH canon, here. Demyx and Luxord get to live through this, I guess, because I don't think Marluxia would have any real grudge with them, lmao

Marluxia had never wanted his heart back. He had been a better Nobody than he had ever been a Somebody. They had _all_ been better as Nobodies. Then, they had been nothing and yet everything, each of them with the unending potential of the swirling, teeming darkness behind them. Their mere existences existed as such an anachronism to the light, such an _affront_ , but oh, they had been powerful. Untouchable, invincible against all but the Keyblade. Marluxia wants it back.

Marluxia wants revenge.

Marluxia had never wanted his heart back, never desirous of the humanity he had once had. The humanity that all of the fools with whom he had been one of Thirteen now have. With humanity though, comes hearts. Hearts and all of the weak organs that come with it. Fat with blood, tender, delicate. Easily broken. 

With flesh can come failing. With organic matter comes growth and decay. A rejuvenation, cyclical, as life should be. All things must flower, and die, and rot so they can return. 

(All things must die, except for him. He will live on, feeding on the decay of those who had doubted him, deceived him, _destroyed_ him and themselves.)

It had been phoenix-like, the way all of those simpering fools arose from the ashes of Xemnas’ Organization, and like sacrificial lambs they will become Marluxia’s composted corpses. He will carve out a garden of horrors in his niche of this world that is his, this place that is and is not, and it will continue to feed on the offal that the Organization offers. 

Each plot has a place, a _name_. Like the graveyard of Never Was that Xemnhas had named _Proof of Existence,_ as if pretty words could change what they were, what Marluxia still is, inside. A stele for each of them, inevitable, rising up like crooked teeth from a macabre maw. Marluxia will not write epitaphs or eulogies, will not desecrate his garden with unsightly gravestones but oh, they will die here.

He will bury them all by hand. Without magic, without darkness. On his knees in the dirt, spade and rake in hand, tending to the fertile soil the way it needs. The way it _deserves_. His fingers will sink deep into wet earth and rotting flesh alike, wet and pungent beneath his fingertips. He will revel in it, this rot, and will swell with power as his garden grows. This is as it should be, feeding this hunger.

Zexion, first. He has always been a problem. Too proud by far of his place at the inner circle, on the cusp but still in that coveted _Six_. He has always looked down his nose at Marluxia, and Marluxia has always wanted to _break him_. 

Marluxia does not forget, and he does not forgive. He grinds the Graceful Dahlia down against Zexion’s neck until the blade bites into the skin, until blood pools as if from a rose’s thorny prick. Flowers bloom along the seam of where his throat is slitting, like poppies pressed into paper bleed out their colors.

Spider lilies, chrysanthemums, beautiful blossoms of bloody red spill out from the malformed mouth opening like a chasm on the line of his neck. Zexion sputters, blood burbling from his mouth, and Marluxia bears down harder. Slowly, ever so slowly. If he presses too harshly, the fun will be over too soon, the blooms will be crushed. He wants to enjoy them for as long as he can, this destruction. It seems only right to delight in the death as much as the coming decay. Zexion’s hands rise to hold the edges of the scythe, his instinct to _survive_ kicking into overdrive as he slices his hands to ribbons grasping through too-slick blood on a blade that will not let up. As if he could overpower Marluxia, as if he could _stop_ this _._

As if he could ever deny returning to the soil from when he came.

From Zexion’s corpse, Marluxia takes his shredded hands as a trophy. Tiny, useless things, sliced to ribbons, strips of skin hanging by meager threads from how hard he’d struggled. Marluxia hacks them off at the wrist and sets them raw side down, in the dirt among amaryllis and sage. The schemer’s Lexicon, pathetic little tool that it is, is propped against them: a garden ornament. Marluxia reads it as he tends to the hollyhock that sprouts from his plot.

Vexen, oh… how he wants to take his time with Vexen. The betrayer, the cold colluder… what a death he deserves. Marluxia is still furious that the scholar would believe he would not be found out, that he was crafty and cunning enough to deceive the Eleventh. He has not forgotten his crimes. He wants to freeze each limb in turn and stomp on it, make Vexen watch as his skin freezes down past the muscle, as it goes pins and needles and then numb with death. He wants to make him watch as Marluxia’s boot shatters his body into shards of glassy ice. 

He wants to, but any gardener knows that frost harms flowers. It chokes out life, and Marluxia will not jeopardize the lives of the delicate sprouts and bulbs that have not yet been born, the ones that are still _becoming_. He will not risk these for a petty revenge and so the scythe, then, the tip swift and vicious as it slices through Vexen’s neck and severs his tongue. He spits it out and Marluxia digs his fingers into the bloody remnants of his face, filling the empty space in Vexen’s dead, dry mouth with rich, wet dirt and seeds of yellow snapdragons. Deception, indeed, and there is a poeticism in the chilly fool decaying in the moist heat of the greenhouse. Winter will always bow to spring, to rebirth. All ice must melt. 

Xigbar, Xaldin, Lexaeus… they are each an annoyance, but only slightly. Marluxia dispatches them easily, remembering that Vexen and Zexion had reported everything to them. Every time he had set foot in a room in Castle Oblivion, every time he smiled, every time he sniffed at one of the flowers that twined their way around the castle. Each of his movements, observed and judged, and so they too, must die. 

He cuts them into pieces and scatters them like seeds in the raw soil he’s just tilled. Aside from Lexaeus’ skull sawed into a pot cradling sprouts of fuzzy borage and clustered blue hyacinth, he cannot tell which parts belong to whom. A hand, a foot, an ear, pieces of his enemies. Some buried six feet down, some just beneath the dirt.

Axel and Saïx are buried together. He calls it fate that they are finally together in a matched double-plot only in death and writes it down as poetic justice the same way it had been when he’d made them kill each other. Forced by the vines that coil around his arms, Axel’s chakrams spin until they are gouging into Saix’s chest, opening up the cavity that is cavernous with its freshly installed heart beating out blood at an alarming rate. They whir like the blades of chainsaws, silent but for the wet _thunk_ as they embed themselves in flesh. As he bleeds, as he _dies_ , Saix’s claymore finds Axel’s chest and sinks in _deep_ , flaying skin and crunching bone. Saïx’s fractured ribs are sharpened shards of broken teeth in a ripped-open, bloodied maw, broken under a fist, and there is nothing but a mass of pulpy gore where his chest once was.

Yes, there is a beauty to be found in their murder-suicide, but more beauty still when they decay beneath his garden. From their death-union sprouts camellias of rich red and pulpy pink, fuzzy myrtle like tiny clouds, crimson chrysanthemums. 

Once Sora has outlived his usefulness, Marluxia does away with him, too. It is almost sad to watch the light fade from those oceanic eyes, but there is a thrill in viewing the portrait the little Keyblade wielder paints against the garden encroaching at his back - a sad, dying thing framed against overflowing life. Marluxia strangles him softly, gently, so there is barely a mark on him besides the bruises around his throat. His Dahlia is not precise enough for his next movements, and so he extracts a dagger from an inside pocket of his coat and makes a cut here, a cut there, working on borrowed time as his body grows cold When he’s cut enough notches and Sora’s sun-kissed skin is loose and pliant, Marluxia fills the holes with soil and pokes seeds inside of each with his fingertips. He waters them, urging them to take root. 

Soon, Sora is a veritable topiary. He grows tiny stalks of dill and delicate snowy daisies, and one single zinnia blooms from the sweet soil of what was once an eye socket. 

All around Marluxia, his garden is flowering. A wasteland of rot and ruin that has led to beauty, with him at the center of it. This is his design, made real, with Larxene at his side bearing a crown of hydrangea and ivy woven by Naminé’s delicate, bird-like artist’s hands. 

Naminé **,** thestoryteller herself. Web-weaver, memory-master, Marluxia’s little bird in a gilded cage. Defeated, debased, she will live and die as a decoration atop the fountain that trickles sweetly amidst it all. She is bound with vines at her ankles, her thighs, her bare, goose-pimpled arms. He’s made their puppet princess a throne of white carnations, crocus, calla lilies. She should be grateful. She is angelic, cherubic, a pure and untouched centerpiece amidst a slew of gore and carnage. The finishing touch.

Surrounded by begonia and belladonna, Marluxia cultivates tansy, jasmine, crab blossoms. He sharpens his scythe against a whetstone. He lies prone on the rich, damp dirt and breathes deeply the smells of rot and rebirth. Inhale, putrefaction and decay, exhale, growth.

He has won, and his garden is complete.

**Author's Note:**

> Some notes on flower meanings: 
> 
> amaryllis - pride, begonia - beware, belladonna - silence, poison, borage - bluntness, calla lily - beauty, camelia - you’re a flame in my heart (red), longing for you (pink), carnations - innocence, a woman’s gift (white), chrysanthemum - I love you (red), crab blossom - ill nature, crocus - youthfulness, dill - powerful against evil, hollyhock - ambition, hydrangea - gratitude for being understood, frigidity, hyacinth - constancy (blue), ivy - friendship, fidelity, jasmine - grace, elegance, lavender - distrust, sage - wisdom, snapdragon - deception, tansy - declaring war, hostile thoughts, zinnia - thoughts of absent friends
> 
> I am [tsunderestorm](http://twitter.com/tsunderestorm) on twitter! ♥


End file.
